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Tension mounts over Iran deal

Negotiators from the five members of the United Nations’ Security Council, the European Union and Germany will resume talks with Iran on 16 June in a downbeat mood about the prospects of reaching a comprehensive agreement on international oversight of Iran’s nuclear programme by a 20 July deadline.

Going into the previous round of talks, in mid-May, the hope had been that negotiators would start drafting an agreement that would allow Iran to develop a civilian nuclear programme in exchange for taking measures to ensure that the nuclear energy it produced could not be harnessed for military use.

However, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, said that the sides had “not reached the point to start drafting the final agreement”, while US and Western officials indicated their disappointment at the end of the talks. Among the points at issue is the number of centrifuges that Iran could use to enrich uranium.

Negotiations have also been complicated by a UN report, seen by Reuters, that concludes that “Iran is continuing development of its ballistic missile and space programmes”. The UN in 2010 banned Iran from developing missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

Iran also needs to reassure the West on a separate issue, verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into what the UN body describes as the “non-diversion of nuclear material” away from civilian to military use. The IAEA’s director-general, Yukiya Amano, said on 2 June that Iran was engaging “substantively” and taking “practical measures…as planned”, but that “the agency is not in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran”.

To inject momentum into the process, Iran will hold separate bilateral meetings with the United States, Russia and France ahead of the 16-20 June talks in Vienna, though the negotiations as a whole are being led by Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief. The negotiators are under intense pressure from governments around the region, with Israel leading warnings that a weak agreement could lead to a regional arms race.

During a visit to Brussels last month, Israel’s minister for strategic affairs, Yuval Steinitz, told Helga Schmid, the EU diplomat in charge of day-to-day handing of the Iran dossier, that “Israel is not against a diplomatic solution”. But he added that a deal “should be more similar to the type of agreement reached with Libya than with North Korea”.

Libya’s decision to abandon its nuclear weapons in 2003 after negotiations with the US and the UK was, Steinitz told journalists, about “dismantlement”, while a 2007 agreement with North Korea was “mainly about freezing not dismantling; some elements were but the main aspects were not”.

If no deal on Iran’s programme is reached by the end of July, Western sanctions would snap back into place. An alternative would be to extend the interim deal reached in November, under which – among other moves – the EU suspended measures that had prevented Iran exporting its energy to non-EU customers and the US released some frozen funds.

Even if negotiators reach an agreement, there would remain the possibility that the US Congress or Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, could block it. Since assuming Iran’s presidency in August, Hassan Rouhani has repeatedly stressed the importance for Iran’s economy of ending the sanctions regime, while a resolution of the decade-old nuclear dispute is seen as the centrepiece of the Middle East policy of US President Barack Obama.

For the EU, a delay would cause diplomatic and institutional complications, because a new chief of EU foreign policy is to be in place by November, as a member of the European Commission. One national diplomat said that, if an agreement seemed imminent in November, the EU might delay the naming of Ashton’s replacement “not for years, but for up to several months”. He added: “If you have a fair chance of resolving this issue forever, why should you change this person for some other person?” Member states would not want the EU to be blamed for the collapse of talks, he said.